Reputation-based trust management has been previously considered for a wide range of applications including the following: online auction sites, Web service selection, and peer-to-peer networks.
Many online auction sites, such as eBay.com, rate buyers and sellers by collecting and aggregating feedback. However, such online auction schemes are often very vulnerable to strategic misbehavior because the aggregate ratings provide very little contextual information.
Reputation management has also been applied to the problem of Web service selection. In this line of work, the reputation management systems are designed to protect clients by facilitating their selection of the most reputable Web services. However, existing work on Web service selection does not look at reputation from a perspective other than the client's perspective.
The prevalence of bogus content being disseminated in peer-to-peer file sharing applications has also led to much research on reputation management systems for peer-to-peer networks. However, unlike a peer-to-peer network running a single application, a group of servers could potentially host many different applications with each server having its own criteria for trust.
Accordingly, improved techniques are needed for adaptively determining trust in client-server environments.